And remember... a Revelation without dancing is a revelation not worth having. :D — 0 thru 9
What has made you believe there is no God? — Beebert
And I have more problems with teachers of Christianity like John Chrysostom, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Martin Luther, and Jonathan Edwards than with the New Testament itself. — Beebert
I don't know what to call the beliefs i hold now. What do you call a dog of many different breeds? A mutt? I was raised Catholic with 12 years of religious school, so i don't think the Christianity would go away even if i tried. And that's ok. What i mentioned before about Enlightenment and the Holy Spirit being real, is as real as i have ever found any "thing" to be, for what it is worth. Also the Tao Te Ching has given much guidance and clarity.Are you a christian? — Beebert
Half the people in the world think — Joseph Campbell
"Half of the people are drowning, and the other half are swimming in the wrong direction.
Half of the people are stoned, and the other half are waiting for the next election." — Stephen Schwartz, librettist for Bernstein's Mass
Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions...are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies. — Joseph Campbell
Right. Well, none of these guys died for your sins. But they occasionally had good things to say. Like Luther: “Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly.” — Bitter Crank
This means that the highest value in christianity is personhood. — Beebert
Buddha seems much more realistic in this sense. He doesn't speak as much about reward and punishment, and you can always make up for your mistakes. Life doesn't end when you fail so to say. In christianity, if you fail when you know the truth, God is out to get you. Buddha doesn't even need a God. Also, Buddha stands above and beyond good and evil. The evil man who curses him is like a man who tries to spit at a cloud, but instead of reaching the cloud, the spit goes right back at him. Christians are obsessed with the division between sheep and goats. There, if one "spits" at God, then God will cast you in to a lake of fire. So, in my opinion, the "reward" in christianity is greater than the reward in buddhism, but the punishment is far far worse and makes the reward not worth it it seems to me. — Beebert
When a thing is corrupted, its corruption is an evil because it is, by just so much, a privation of the good…Unless this something is good, it cannot be corrupted, because corruption is nothing more than the deprivation of the good…As long as a thing is being corrupted, there is good in it of which it is being deprived…If, however, the corruption comes to be total and entire, there is no good left either, because it is no longer an entity at all. — Augustine
because at every moment, one still has the option to act differently to how karma would dictate, and all of us have the potential for wisdom — Wayfarer
The problem here is, someone with a generally healthy upbringing would seem to be better equipped to be responsible for herself, than someone with an unhealthy upbringing. Maybe I'm generalizing or simplifying. But this still seems to be the tension, to me. I want to believe that we're each responsible for ourselves, but is this, then, a set reality for all of humanity? — Noble Dust
A drug addict on the street, for instance; I live in the city, as I seem to recall you do as well. Do we tell them they are responsible for their actions? Thus telling them they are wholly responsible for the pariah state they're now living in? — Noble Dust
Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.
That is the precise meaning of 'catharsis'. That is the work we all have to do, by some means or another. Unfortunately in our culture it is hardly understood at all; as I say, I consider myself lucky to have encountered it. — Wayfarer
But I think any kind of therapy or treatment would require them to acknowledge that they have a problem, and that they would have to own it and accept therapy. If they don't, they don't. We can't change other people, we can try and help them where possible. Our responsibility is to know ourselves and be able to act wisely, — Wayfarer
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